Remembering the Ulster Covenant

June 05

• 2002 Alex Maskey (50) became the first Sinn Féin lord mayor of Belfast.
• 1981 It was reported that five men in California were suffering from a rare form of pneumonia that was found in patients with weakened immune systems—the first recognised cases of AIDS, which was to kill over 30 million worldwide.
• 1920 Cornelius Ryan, war correspondent and author, notably of the best-seller The longest day (1959), which became a film that set box-office records, born in Dublin.
• 2002 Former US President Bill Clinton opened a new £3 million peace centre named after him on the site of the 1987 Remembrance Sunday bombing in Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh.
• 1988 Robert Dudley Edwards, professor of modern Irish history at UCD (1945–79) and writer, notably of Church and state in Tudor Ireland (1935), died.
• 1968 Robert Kennedy (42), leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for the presidency, was mortally wounded by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. He died the following day.
• 1967 The Six-Day War began, in which Israel heavily defeated Egypt and her Arab allies, capturing the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
• 1916 Kerry-born Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, secretary of state for war, lost his life, along with over 600 others, when HMS Hampshire struck a German mine and sank west of the Orkney Islands, Scotland.
• 1916 Lord Kitchener, Kerry-born field marshal, was lost at sea when HMS Edinburgh was struck by a mine off the Orkneys. Winston Churchill would have accompanied him in what was a war-boost trip to Russia had he not been dropped from the coalition cabinet the previous January owing to pressure from the Conservatives.
• 1868 James Connolly, socialist and revolutionary, born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, to Irish immigrant parents.
• 1646 Battle of Benburb, Co. Tyrone.